


Interludes with the Muggles

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Series: Notes from the Wizarding World [6]
Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: House Elves, Muggle-borns, Muggles, Squibs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:49:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories for those who are touched by the Wizarding World, and who cannot touch back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nightmare

In Melbourne there lived a couple, a cosmopolitan and clever couple who spent their days operating a private practice and their nights watching films, attending lectures, teaching night classes, and driving to the theater ( _A Winter’s Tale! We_ must _go see it_!).

And people could see that they were happy. There were no signs that anything was missing. Their life seemed to have been constructed for them by some benevolent force outside their control, which had determined that theirs should be an existence blissfully free of any inconvenience, annoyance, or pain.

Except for the nightmare. In the cold hours of the morning, when Dr. Granger would toss and turn and wake Dr. Granger, they would sit up, disheveled, and look at each other, and resolutely not discuss the little girl they both saw when they closed their eyes at night.  _But who is she?_  they would later think, while pulling teeth and cleaning gums.  _Who is she?_  they would ask themselves, laughing with noted experts on dental radiology.  _Who is she?_  they wondered, midway through the Melbourne Underground Troupe’s terrifically intellectual take on Shakespeare.

They did not know anything about her, beyond a solid conviction that somewhere, in some wild forest or rambling castle or terrible manor, in some fantastic place, she existed. She was real.

That was not the nightmare. The nightmare was that they knew she was alone.


	2. Cecilia

_She should have forgiven him_  became the refrain.

She was blind. How rotten of her to hold one small infidelity against him, how completely unheard of, how childish. She was spoiled — that was it. She was a perfect failure of a female, the coddled and simple-minded of the species. She’d become unmanageable, a new kind of woman, all garish makeup and frivolity, pleading for boarding school, demanding her own flat, reading mind-rotting novels that praised an un-romantic egalitarianism, ballroom socialism applied to the genders.

And so she had little appreciation for how wonderfully he had treated her; how he had shielded her from ugly sights and cherished her pretty ignorance; his patient demeanor as he explained world events over tea, keeping the worst of it from her for the sake of purest chivalry; his little gifts, flowers and oranges and ribbons, tokens demonstrating the open kindness of a country squire; his frank approval of the childish delight she’d once taken in his home and his grounds; his manly politics; how here there was no weak, limp-wristed aesthete complaining of his father’s Bore War, but instead a man full of national pride, a handsome and stalwart person, a hunting man, someone any girl would have been proud to call hers.

She had looked across at him, had heard him complain of being deceived, had listened to a description of the girl (“A  _slattern_ , darling, nothing like you”), had sat through those declarations of love that he would not have made if he hadn’t expected blanket forgiveness in turn, and then, very calmly, she’d told Bensonmum to please show their guest to the door.

How stupid that Cecilia was. Tom Riddle could have given her everything. He would have stood her well as a husband. He would have made a wonderful father.


	3. Payback

Tulip, eldest daughter of the UK’s premier boxing announcer, was a practical girl, attractive in an average way, a connoisseur of reality television and handbags, blessedly normal and never afraid to be boring. But her younger sister, Calla, was a freak. And there was nothing they could do about it.

So she assured Calla that the crazed man with the pointed hat was lying even if he did have a funny plant that could talk. Only it couldn’t, because plants didn’t talk and never would. And anyway those the owls had escaped from the zoo, probably. And all those letters were some kind of postal accident because who really mailed letters anymore? Weird people who didn’t have the internet. Of which Calla Dursley wasn’t one, and never would be, and anyway Gran  _didn’t_  hate her.

"She does, Tuley," said Calla, who had a way of knowing things, "She always has."

But for once sensible Tulip was right. Petunia didn’t hate her granddaughter. She was only ashamed and regretful. And scared. Once, the Wizarding World had entrusted her with a child, and then it had taken him away with owls and letters and wondrous visitations. Just like it took her sister. And now it would take her granddaughter.

She hadn’t taken very good care of the child. Magic had a way of paying you back for things like that.


	4. Aster Naught

It  _is_  a shame about Peony Pucey. I was down at Boarstall Park — you know, where the Puceys live? Normally such a neat, proper magical home. But there she was, all tarted up like a Muggle. Face painted, not wearing proper robes. And the Puceys are so  _patient_  with her! "Oh, our Peony isn’t one for the Wizarding Wireless." "Oh, our Peony just wants a smoke by herself - she’s something solitary, our Peony. Always has been." "Oh, our Peony should tell you all about her Aster Naught work. Do tell, our Peony."

To see them trying to salvage the situation is dreadful. Young Adrien, he appears not the slightest bit resentful as they all sit round Peony and discuss Test Pie Letting, which is surely something disgraceful that jealous Muggles do, on account of how they can’t fly themselves. And all the while no one congratulates Adrien on his own Chaser work for the Slytherin Quidditch team, and the dear doesn’t say a word. Just looks up at that shameful sister of his with pretend adoration in his eyes. Oh, it  _must_  be difficult for him. 

And then there’s little Primrose, who is so handy with charms. But no one compliments her on that when Peony is about. They just discuss how Peony can engineer.  _What_  she engineers they do not say. Probably a means to swallow up all her parents’ attention, which, for a girl like her, is disgraceful.

But the one who suffers most must be Primula. She married a Baddock,  and they’ve three lovely little boys, all showing decent signs of magic. But you would think the poor dears didn’t exist when Peony is around. Talk turns to Peony’s husband, who is a Texan, which is I think a kind of American Muggle that specializes in milking oils out of cacti, and who has some atrocious name like Suares or Borres or Messes. Oh, to hear them go on about Suares Messes! “They met at  _training!”_ (As though one could fix what’s wrong with Peony through simple training). “He is an  _expert_  in Military Water Survival!” (Which I think is properlyuseless, as all one needs for that sort of thing is some Gillyweed). “He sent our Peony to the moon, you know!”

Well, let me tell you, after so much talk about that horrible, worthless girl, finally I could not take it. I stomped out after Peony when she went to smoke one of her filthy little cigars, and I said, “Well, I don’t believe you’ve been to the moon, Peony, as we all know perfectly well you couldn’t summon up a Cleansweep to fly to Bristol on a clear Tuesday.”

And do you know what that horrible girl told me? She said, “But I  _have_  been, cousin Parkinson. Honest.”

Which we all know must be a lie. So then I said, “I just as soon wish you had been, Peony, and I just as soon wish you’d stayed there, with how utterly arrogant and presumptuous it is of you to show your face around proper magical folk! Your poor, long-suffering family should not have to see you about, Peony, and that’s Merlin’s own truth!”

Oh, yes, I told her what was on my mind. Now, perhaps Headley and Princepia and Adrian and the girls are a bit angry with me now — and they must pretend to be, for Peony’s sake — but someone had to say it. For a girl like Peony to force her family into such a charade… It’s atrocious. Even Adrian, who is normally so sensibly Slytherin, was caught up in it.

"You can’t talk to Peony like that!" he said, when he came upon us, "I think you ought to leave, cousin Parkinson. Peony is a success. She’s an Aster Naught!"

Have you ever heard such a silly term? I don’t know what an Aster Naught is supposed to be. Something they’ve made up to cover up the shame, poor dears. But they never will. They pretend to be proud, but we all know perfectly well that being proud of a Squib is impossible. You’d sooner ship Muggles to the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Idea for a Squib astronaut supplied by tumblr user qserasera; many thanks, qserasera!


	5. Frank

Young Frank Bryce will come back early from the war and will come back wrong; and will live alone, suspicious, powerless to stop the neighborhood boys vandalising his home and uprooting all his hard work; and will be laughed at, derided, and in pain from a wound that never really heals: and will be the man the village really does not want, who will be better off dying.

But when he does die, he will face it bravely. Which is more than you can say for his murderer.


	6. Dream

Petunia had a dream once and it was a very simple dream that she tells herself is the root of all her unhappiness and that she uses to shore up all the things she does. It is not that she cranes her neck to spy on the neighbors; it is only that she was denied that knowledge that she dreamed about. It is not that she spoils her son so terribly that she endangers his health; it is that no one ever spoiled her, because she was unremarkable, because her fantastic dream never came true.

But then she wakes savagely, suspecting that even if it had come true, even if she could have followed her to that fantastic place, Lily still would have had that touch of something else, that cleverness, that open heart, that  _prettiness_ , that aspect that placed her in the sun and Petunia in the shadows.

And so Petunia shoves Vernon aside and climbs out of bed and puts on her slippers and screeches at her nephew to wake up. And if people should talk, well, then she still doesn’t care. She still claws after her dream and holds it up in her mind’s eye, as though it were a reason to be the way she is.


	7. Playhouse

The vanishing cabinet became nearly unmarketable after the great battle of Hogwarts destroyed its twin. It was now, to the horror of Mr. Borgin’s clientele, quite an ordinary, commonplace cabinet. So Mr. Borgin sold it for three sickles to Nott, who used it to display dark artifacts until the Auror raid. Then it was seized by the Ministry and put to auction, where its aura of dark magic attracted several prominent buyers, not the least of them Mrs. Dolohov _._  She stored vials of centaur blood there, or possibly let her vampire lovers sleep in it, until she died and it passed to Parkinson, her nephew, who shipped it clandestinely to the Mediterranean with the corpse of a sworn enemy and poor duelist stored inside. On the way, the vessel crashed on the shores of North Africa and was passed from bazaar to bazaar until Weasley, a cursebreaker, took a shine to it and thoroughly de-cursed the thing.

Then he sold it to a nice Muggle whose children used it as a fairytale cupboard. They and their descendants acted out thrilling and unspeakable fantasies within, forever innocent of the cabinet’s true origins.


	8. Hugo (the first)

Sophy Hero Hugo had ten million dreams, but she shelved them when she went to school. 

She tucked them away in her books. In one anthropological study, she outlined, on the page where the bookmark still sits today, a naive plan to break entire peoples from the confines of how society saw them. In a series of religious tracts, she sketched a seven-point plan for how to expose recalcitrant and traditional governments to new ways of thinking. In her  _Collected Works of Shakespeare_ , she spun great courageous epics for herself, visits to a new world, some odd and unknown country, an image of studious little Sophy arriving on Prospero’s Island and yet making the best of it, or exploring and mastering the arts of some strange Illyria.

But she became a dentist.

Her parents were practical folk — there was a strain of solid common sense in the Hugos. And so to dental school went Sophy, with her dreams all ready for her, filed and catalogued on the shelf, but her future laid out in floss and false teeth. Some hint of her dreams remained. They seemed to filled up her eyes when she peered across the room at serious Ian Granger, they curled around her wrists like smoke when she — contradictory, not quite sure she was on the right path, not quite fully committed to dentistry, not yet nobly devoted to the pursuit of healthy teeth — lit a cigarette, and they otherwise appeared to sit dormant and hidden in the curl of her bushy hair.

But for the most part the dreams were retired. They gathered dust until the day Hermione should stumble upon them, pack them up quite by accident in her school trunk along with the books; and eventually, someday, make them real.


	9. Lealy & the Muggles

The house became a livery stable, then a pub, then a demolished and empty lot with nothing but bunches of weeds in it, then a square office building, then a heap of rubble; and then, finally, an art museum.

And still Lealy did not leave. 

Lealy was the truest soul that ever lived, you see; and he watched the old old men of the old old family venture forth into the world to be crowned and manipulated and murdered, and saw the old old women retire, for an instant, to bed, and never come back up again. And when they were gone he befriended the horses, and made sure there were always sugar lumps for them (but not too many), and had the ruder stablehands sacked and the kinder ones rewarded. And at the pub Lealy saw the happy drunks home safely, and the cruel ones to the gutter. And, when he was surrounded by nothing but great bunches of weeds, Lealy helped them grow as tall as weeds could, and saw to it that they blossomed into sturdy, fuzzy flowers to captivate passing schoolchildren. 

Even the office building prospered because Lealy was there. The young men and women with padded shoulders to give them courage became genuinely brave over time, for Lealy would make sure that their charts and graphs were always in the right place, that there was always a cuppa for them at their desks, and that in the angular boardroom the men with cruel eyes and bristling mustaches were seated in the lowest, most unreliable, most uncomfortable office chairs — Lealy liked to reserve the lowest places for the lowest people.

Lealy even stacked the rubble, when the office building came down; and kept a solid fellow in a sturdy hat from plummeting to his death; and contained the great billowing of smoke so that no worker, busy demolishing and building back up again, might find their lungs clouded up and their futures likewise clouded with sickness.

But in the museum Lealy found something new, something different. Here people came not to shore up old names, or discuss charts and graphs, or even to drink away their sorrows. Here people hung rebellion on the walls, and preserved brilliant moments between loved ones, so like those precious moments long ago with the old family that Lealy had by now nearly forgotten. And so Lealy became the protector not of horses or harassed secretaries, but of ideas, of progress, of bursts of expression.

It was the oddest task Lealy had ever had. The pictures did not need a cuppa. But he soon learned to protect them from camera flashes. The young artists who came all full of dreams did not want his service. But perhaps they could use some inspiration — which was a harder thing to provide by far.

But Lealy took to it. Lealy never shirked his duties. And so he began to swell up as he never had before, learning about love in the curve of a brushstroke, and beauty as it was reflected in the glaze of a common pot. They did not use the pots to make tea here; they displayed them. Ordinary, loyal little things — they were now repurposed as beautiful, ornate, precious, worthy of admiration.

Lealy loved the museum best of all. And the museum-goers, they loved him. They came looking for something extraordinary (one does not look for wonderment in a pub or in stables or in an office building, or even at home — but in a museum! That is a different story), and the ones with the clearest eyes, the youngest hearts, the most open minds — they found Lealy. 

Lealy would whisper to them the secrets of how to stay loyal and true, and, above all else, how to put kindness into the world. Lealy was not supposed to talk to these clear-eyed persons, not really. While Lealy had stayed in this one spot, watched it mutate around him, the world had undergone even greater mutations, and now there was a Statute that said Lealy was not supposed to be in a Muggle museum at all.

But what did Lealy care for such ever-changing, unreliable things as Statutes? Statutes are forged to tell men their proper places. But Lealy was no man. He was a house elf; he did not need to be told where he belonged.


	10. Special

At a friend’s house, she thought she heard the familiar, funny voice saying, “Oh, hang on. She doesn’t think you ought to invite the Nagra family to formal afternoon tea, on account of ruining the  _Englishness_  of it? She knows where tea comes from, right?”

And for a moment there she was, almost in the flesh.

And then later when, with the Women’s Association she visited those sad people from council housing who lived all surrounded by piles of filthy clothes, she saw her again, and this time she was saying, “Oh, come off it.  _We_  grew up in a place not much better than this. And it wasn’t pinched-face women showing us how to separate lights and darks that helped us, but  _attention_. Being treated like people.”

And later in the day, at the park with her dear darling diddums, she showed up to pester her again, saying, “Oh, let him run a bit more. Give him some  _air_. He’s not a — well. Alright. He is a baby. But look at him, he’s longing to be set free! Let him learn to take risks, and he’ll turn out magnificent!”

But when she appeared in the middle of the road, her sister had had enough.

"Go away!" she shrieked, stopping the car and looking cautiously about to make sure no one could see all this freakishness, "Of course you use it for, for bothering people, and making a nuisance of yourself, and—"

"I told you once about the Continuum Theory, right?" said her sister, "Marius Marchbanks’s theory? The Dark Wizards killed him for it, I told you. You see, he thought it wasn’t an on-off switch, with magic. He thought it was more that some people had enough to make them full-fledged witches and wizards, but others, like Muggles and Squibs, could still have trace amounts. It was a paragraph in my— well, in  _some_  stupid textbook. You can’t remember which one. The point is: it’s different than what we were told.”

"What are you  _talking_  about?” Petunia said. 

"Nothing?" Lily said, widening her eyes oh-so-innocently, the way she used to when she knew she wasn’t the one in trouble. "Because I’m not here. This is all you. And you’re connecting it, on some level, with how I told you about the Continnuum Theory once, hoping this is what that is, your small trace of magic. That it’s not me, but you. Because you always wanted to be special—"

"I never wanted to be a freak!" Petunia said.

"Oh, don’t say that," said Lily, "Don’t say that. Stop thinking like that. Stop being bitter, and upset. You don’t even like being like this. And soon there’ll be a change in your life, and you’ll need to be as strong as you  _can_ be—”

“ _Go away_ ,” Petunia screamed, and stepped on the accelerator.

Before Lily vanished, she said, “Oh, Tuney, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

But Petunia did not understand this vision, this odd harbinger, the only special thing she had ever accomplished. Not until she found the baby on her doorstep the next day.


End file.
